Mass-produced paint color swatches, also known as color chips or color cards, which are commonly supplied by paint manufacturers, are widely used to visually judge the suitability of paint colors being considered for painting projects involving walls, ceilings, floors, fences, cabinets, etc. The number of different colors represented by mass-produced paint color swatches is limited to a group of colors chosen by the paint manufacturer to balance the manufacturer's need to have an economical and manageable inventory of paint color swatches against the user's desire to have the widest variety of color swatches from which to choose a color that meets each user's unique decorating needs. Mass-produced paint color swatches are generally made using fast-drying lacquers or inks which are designed to be applied to opaque color swatch substrates, usually heavy white paper or cardstock, using high speed coating or printing machinery. Except for color, such lacquers and inks are compositionally and functionally very different from the commercially available paints which are used to decorate and protect the surfaces found in the everyday environment (walls, ceilings, floors, shelves, cabinets, doors, etc.). Mass-produced paint color swatches enable the user to review and choose colors which are available from a specific group of paint products which are formulated to deliver the mass-produced swatch colors when colored with color pigment concentrates known commercially as tinters or colorants. In other words, mass-produced swatches are ordinarily not designed or intended to be used to judge the ability of any paint characteristic, other than color, to meet user needs. Notably, ordinary mass-produced paint color swatches are not designed or intended to be used to judge the very important characteristic of hiding power of the actual paints used for coating painting project surfaces (walls, ceilings, floors, shelves, cabinets, doors, etc.). “Hiding power” is commonly defined as a measure of the ability of a paint, stain or other surface coating to visually obscure a substrate surface exhibiting one or more contrasting colors. A paint having high hiding power can be used to reliably obscure substrate colors ranging from pure white to pure black and all colors and shades commonly included in the gamut of colors commercially available in the form of a paint, stain or other surface coating. Paints having high hiding power require thinner and/or fewer coats to obscure a substrate having one or more contrasting colors. Using thinner and/or fewer coats of topcoat paint yields material and time savings which advantageously reduces the cost and the time required to complete a painting project.
Paints containing sufficient amounts of inorganic or mineral pigments like titanium dioxide, iron oxide and carbon black are known to have high hiding power because of their ability to scatter and/or absorb light of many visible wavelengths. Conversely, it is well known by those skilled in the art that paints colored primarily with organic pigments having a high level of color purity, saturation or chroma do not scatter light efficiently and consequently tend to be semitransparent, have poor hiding power and generally require the application of multiple coats to obscure a substrate surface color or colors. Because the poor hiding power associated with high chroma paints is commonly not recognized by the general public including the ordinary paint user, the color achieved on the user's painting project surface (walls, ceilings, floors, shelves, cabinets, doors, etc.) often does not match the color exhibited by the mass-produced swatch because the original color of the project's surface partially shows through one or more coats of a characteristically low hiding power high chroma paint. The show-through of the original surface color visually alters or adulterates the topcoat paint's color to the point where the topcoat paint's color appears to be noticeably different from that color expected on the basis of viewing the corresponding mass-produced paint color swatch which is necessarily designed to represent the topcoat paint's color when no show-through of various unknown substrate colors occurs.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,546,007 and 5,700,515 teach the use of high hiding power neutral white and gray primer coatings over a colored surface prior to topcoating with a low hiding power high chroma paint to eliminate or significantly reduce visual show-through of the original surface color. These patents further teach that the most effective shade of gray chosen for the primer to be used with a specific topcoat color is determined by mathematically comparing spectral reflectance curves for a specific topcoat color with the curves for a series of high hiding power white and gray primers having a range of light reflectance or CIELab lightness/darkness levels. Spectral reflectance curves are measured using sophisticated laboratory spectrophotometer instruments like those described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,700,515. Access to such spectrophotometers and the mathematical knowledge required to use spectral reflectance curves to identify the most effective shade of white or gray primer to prevent substrate color show-through are well beyond the capabilities of the ordinary paint user. Additionally, it is counterintuitive to most paint users that the use of a neutral white or gray primer could effectively improve the hiding power of a high chroma topcoat. The ordinary paint user generally assumes that it would be impossible for a “colorless” neutral white or neutral gray primer to improve the hiding power of a vividly colored, high chroma topcoat; vivid colors and neutral colors intuitively seem to be totally incompatible. As a consequence, most ordinary paint users are reluctant to use a white or gray primer under a high chroma topcoat because they are often unaware of the poor hiding power associated with high chroma topcoats and have an intuitive bias against the concept of employing a neutral white or neutral gray color to improve the perceived hiding power of a high chroma topcoat paint.
Thus several advantages of one or more aspects are to provide an easy-to-use device which allows the user to prepare paint color test swatches which provide the user with direct visually perceived color and hiding power information which is beyond the scope of the commonly available mass-produced paint color swatches known as paint “color chips” or “color cards”.